Six Towers. History of success?

For three years, I posted an application center on the Apple Appstore.
Most of them are interesting only to my inflamed brain.
Some bring up to $ 100 a year. No need to laugh, listen further.
The number of games with an annual income of $ 1,000 is equal to the number of fingers on the hand of an English programmer.
And one application out of hundreds fired. To date, on December 19, it has earned 248,457 money, and by the New Year 2013 it promises to overcome the quarter-million mark.
According to a survey conducted on Habré, 82% of local residents consider this a success.
I have to agree with them.

The article is a fun story about how and why this happened.
There will be no examples of program code. For code examples, go to stackoverflow.com.
Strict editors warn that the application is free, and the article is powerless. So, without links.

The editors are throwing me out of the Game Development hub for the fifth time. I'm at a loss. .

Six Towers App Reviews

Full shit

Pavel Roitberg, Director of MTS Products and Services Development Department.

From the point of view of commercial success, the application is not interesting to us.

Ed Rumley, COO, Chillingo at Electronic Arts.

Dude, never touch the keyboard again, it's not yours

Dolboeb user from the Russian AppStore (the most favorable review).

Publishers from Habr

The starting failure at the apple store did not upset me. The congenital snobbery of the mech-mat graduate and interesting work helped.
And then one day at the beginning of August ...
And one day at the beginning of August 2011 the golubevpavel habitor contacted me and said: -My guy, I'm tired of watching you suffer. Sign an agreement with us, we’ll earn money.
- Like this? - I was surprised.
- We will pull out your game in the top 25 of the British Appstore and you will be in chocolate. But for this, fulfill three wishes.

1) Make the game free;
2) Insert an advertisement;
3) Insert purchases inside the application.

It would be nice to redo the design, I thought, but said nothing and quickly fulfilled three wishes.

Half of the revenue is yours, half of ours.

Contract on 15 sheets. A fax held our handshakes across the ocean.

andreyd22 opened an account for me at appfigures.com so that I can track the proceeds. By and large, everything was built on parole. There are many more decent people in the world than they show us on TV.

Top app

The next day, the application jumped into the top 25 of the British appstore and I began to frantically monitor the revenue.
There was no time to program. The numbers were updated hourly.
200 dollars per day from in-app purchases. 100 dollars from iAd advertising.

Three days later, Paul said: - The application is successful. We go to the US top 25.

Three days later, Six Towers was in the US top 1. The programmer vanity was satisfied. The game in the top lasted a week. Brought crazy money. $ 10,000 a day. See diagrams.

IAd Daily Profit Daily Chart

Annual chart of daily profits from in-app purchases

Familiar Muscovites turned a finger at the temple - Man, you won’t see this money.
I feel sorry for them.

The hypocrites shouted - You are using gray promotion schemes. And urged to buy paid reviews. This is a joke, right?

Leftover apple pie

Over the past year, on the tail of its own success, the toy brought an income of about $ 100-200 per day.
Here's a chart of iAd revenue for the past month.


Here is a graph of the profit from in-app purchases over the past month. In the current version of the program, I refused to buy.


For such casual games, advertising generates revenue three times more than purchases. It makes no sense for the dollar to turn off monthly profitable ads. By the way, an amazing fact is that for almost all applications the percentage of those who made an internal purchase is 2.5. That is, out of the 4,000,000 downloaded, 100,000 will click the buy button.

This report doesn’t include an advertisement report from Google . I hasten to inform you that I found a way to make peace with google and received the first money from the placementadmob ads in your app. This should be written separately in the continuation of my article, how they offended me . I hasten to inform that google is still a corporation of good.

I think for another year she will delight me and my many children.

-Dad, let me collect the turrets.
- Hold on, son, don't accidentally click on ads.

Thanks for attention.